//------------------------------//
// Chapter 32. Weird Critters 
// Story: H'ven Sent 
// by otherunicorn 
//------------------------------//

Bones, skeletons, the remains of those that had made Habitat Ten their home, littered the floor, and it appeared we were the first to disturb them in many years. Each skeleton was more-or-less intact, the occasional bone separate from the others. However, despite the integrity of the skeletons, they were tangled together, suggesting those who had died were either heaped here, post-mortem, or had been struggling with each other when the end came. Since then, nothing had interfered with them, other than the passage of time itself.

I wasn't sure we were looking at a mass extinction event yet, as it was possible there were other ponies living further down in the habitat in perfect health. Nonetheless, the great pile of skeletons here suggested many were trying desperately to escape from Habitat Ten's confinement, but failed to do so, dying here. What had killed them? Conflict? System failure? A disease? More rogue modifiers?

Clearly the last possibility was playing on Brainstorm's mind, despite the all-clear Stormie had given earlier, because he had just released a monumental ball of magic, and propelled it down the ramp, past the bones. It hit somewhere down below, and the weak, pale blue veil of the modifier destroying spell expanded out from its point of impact. As it passed us, there were the occasional sparkles of stray modifiers being terminated, presumably ones that had drifted up here from somewhere down below. I guessed there was a limit to how many twists and turns the spell could take before it lost effectiveness.

"I thought you already killed all the modifiers down there," Cacha said.

"You can never be one hundred percent sure," Brainstorm said. "The first spell was configured not to pass through anything that is or was living, so pockets of modifiers, trapped by the bones, could have survived. That time, I bypassed the limiter. It's slightly more risky, but as we are dealing with corpses, it was justified."

"Wait," Stormie commanded as Brainstorm took a step forward. She cast another spell of her own, waiting as it swept over everything ahead of us. "Nothing toxic is in the air," she said as the spell faded. "If this was caused by toxic gases or airborne pathogens, they are long gone. I'm sure it is safe for us to go down there."

"Safe?" I asked. "There are many other ways one could get killed."

"Oh, you... I mean we are safe from gases, biological threats and modifiers, despite the stink."

"Bullets, on the other hoof, would be just as fatal. What if there is some sort of security system?" I asked, as I willed my hoof gun into existence. If something automated started shooting at us, I wanted to be ready. Actually, if something started shooting us, I didn't even want to be here, period. "Wait here. There's no point in all of us getting shot at."

"We'll pull you back if there is any trouble," Brainstorm said.

"I'll throw up a shield spell for you," Stormie added.

"Thanks."

When the pale blue hue of the shield spell became visible, I began hobbling down the ramp on three legs, sweeping my pistol back and forward as I did. All in all, the trip down was anticlimactic and I arrived at the heap of bones unhindered. Now that I was close to them, the details of the dead became more obvious. Decay and insects had between them cleaned the bones fairly thoroughly. What remained of their clothing was similarly affected. Natural fibers were gone. Treated and synthetic fibers survived, giving the remaining outfits a somewhat skeletal appearance of their own.

The skeletons themselves were rather odd looking. The skulls were the wrong shape. Teeth were too sharp. Hooves were missing, with finger like bones on both fore and hind limbs. So, I had guessed right. Apart from insects, ponies were not the only species in existence. Here at my hooves was the proof. The hoof scanner to this area should have complained that we were of the wrong species, not the wrong race.

"These aren't pony bones," I said.

"What?"

"These bones are of a larger creature than us. Their teeth are pointed. They appear to be designed for tearing something tough, rather than chewing on plants. And there are a lot more differences than that."

"So, we were not alone?" Crimson asked.

"Were being the operative word, unless there are other habitats hidden down here," I said, "or other members of this species further down in this habitat."

"And if there are, they may be hungry, feral and violent, and we could be on the menu," Brainstorm said. "Aneki, I suggest you form a weapon mounted up on your shoulder. It won't hinder your walking that way. Set the trigger so it can be fired while your fingers are still curled up in your hoof."

I hadn't considered that before. I had always assumed the trigger would need to be attached to the portion of the weapon that was external to my body. Then again, the weapon had integrated itself fairly thoroughly into my body, so I could consider myself to be the weapon. I already knew I could form weapons on either hoof or leg. Closing my eyes, I imagined the new configuration, considered it, then made more changes to my mental model. A barrel either side, mounted on my shoulder would give me a better arc of fire. I didn't limit them to pointing forward, instead imagining a gimbal based mount. Magic already took care of the aiming when I was waving the gun around on the end of my hoof, so I didn't see there would be any issues with allowing the targeting spell to directly control the barrels. Satisfied with the design, I committed the wish, shuddering slightly as I felt the mechanisms moving around inside me. That was one part of the system I didn't think I would ever feel comfortable with.

"Wow! Turrets!" Brainstorm said.

"Impressive, Aneki," Stormie said. "You really are getting better at this. That is a configuration I had never considered."

"Well, I am the first to be fitted with the system, after all."

"Did that just come from inside you?" Berry asked, peering down at me from the top of the ramp, "or am I seeing things?"

"You are seeing things... that are real," I said.

"So, what are you?"

"I'm an enhanced Hellite unicorn."

"Modifiers did that to you?"

"No. These two unicorns did it to me," I muttered, giving them a dirty look, just for old time's sake. "They also fixed my horn. I'll fill you in later."

"And even like that, being full of machines, I mean, you are still fertile?" Berry asked. Clearly fertility was something constantly on the mind of the sexless, an annoying little fact of life that kept reminding them of their flaws.

"Not only am I fertile, I am pregnant."

"Sweet Luna!"

That was one way of looking at it, I guessed.

Locating an area of floor that had a lower density of bones, I leaped to it without disturbing the piled skeletons. Now that I was beyond the bottom of the ramp, the walkway opened out into a vestibule. So far, I had been relying on light from the raised lid of the habitat, but down here, there wasn't anything adding to the illumination, apart from my eyes. Staring into the darkness, I was just able to make out the walls. The vestibule was spacious, circular in shape, with the ramp down which I had descended at its center. It was roomy enough to comfortably hold several hundred ponies at party density, or perhaps three times that if you packed them in.

There were numerous doors spaced around the wall, most of them closed. Some were clearly doors to elevators, lifeless floor indicators above them, while others went to service rooms. Signs indicated a pair of rest-rooms, a canteen and several private lounges. There were also as many stairwells as there were elevators: six or seven of them. The door to one stairwell had been battered from the other side until it had opened. A couple of the others showed signs of being pounded from the other side, yet remained firmly closed.

I crossed the floor to one such door and tried the handle. It was rigid, held firm by some sort of lock. Under normal circumstances, this area must have been off limits to those from below, the facilities being used only during ingress and egress. Stepping around more skeletons, I walked to the closest elevator, I pressed the call button, but it remained lifeless despite my action.

"Aneki? Have you found anything?" Brainstorm called from the bottom of the ramp.

I turned to face him, shaking my head. "Apart from more skeletons, no. This place is totally dead. Indications are that these creatures were trying to escape from down below. Going on the relatively low body count, I suspect there isn't a working light in the place. The elevators are dead too."

"Is there any indication of the cause?"

"Down here, no. I suggest we go back up, and check the life-support feeds."





"Your race is not qualified to enter this facility," the scanner said. It was complaining about race instead of species again. I wasn't sure I would call the small room that encased the actual control systems for Habitat Ten, a pony-sized box attached to the gland into the habitat, a facility, though. It was more like a broom closet, a small wart on the perimeter of the massive cylindrical port through which all cables and pipes passed, although, presumably, it did allow one to gain access to the inner workings of the port.

Whatever the case, it was locked, and being made of the same super-tough material as the suspension platform, it was going to be difficult to gain access to. With the power out, down in Habitat Ten, the logical first step was to see if any circuit breakers had tripped, and that meant I had to get inside.

"I have an idea," Brainstorm called, from down in the habitat. "It's a little grotesque, but there is a chance it may qualify. I'll need you to step well back from the scanner."

"Grotesque? Yup, I'll step back for that," I said, moving clear of the locked door. I wondered what Brainstorm had in mind that would qualify as grotesque after all we had already been through.

Moments later a skeleton of one of the weird creatures walked up the ramp, contained in the glow of Brainstorm's magic. He was a few paces behind. Seeing the strangely proportioned remains in motion made me shudder as my brain tried to process the life-like motions of something so obviously dead. I had to suppress my instinct to greet it.

As the bony figure walked past me, I backed away a step, noticing the others with me doing the same. Some quiet mutterings suggested the others weren't exactly happy with this, either. We already knew that if we were to use this habitat as our own, we would have to dispose of hundreds, if not thousands of skeletons, but this was different: it seemed disrespectful.

Under Brainstorm's control, the skeleton marched right up to the scanner, reached up, and deftly pushed the button. Would it work? Could something that was little more than calcium, with traces of long dead DNA, be recognized by the scanner?

"All members of the controlled species must be removed from the vicinity of this facility before the door can be opened," the scanner said. Apparently, it was recognized.

"Wha???" I spluttered. "Controlled species? It is differentiating between race and species now!"

His idea defeated, Brainstorm levitated the skeleton over to a clear patch of floor well away from the scanner, and carefully placed it there.

"Maybe it doesn't like Hellites," Stormie said. "Or maybe it really does want a pegasus."

"Or, perhaps there is another race of ponies about which we have forgotten," I said.

Brainstorm ran a hoof through his mane, making it all stand on end. "You may be right. I vaguely recall there being at five, if not six, different types of pony. I think three of the types had wings."

"But you only mentioned pegasi to me before!"

"Stormie and I actually met an old pegasus when we were colts. I think it was he who told us about the other types. They were less common to begin with."

"And... and one of those types had both a horn and wings. Winged unicorns," Stormie said. "I don't remember anything about other races, though."

"I wonder what caused them to die out. How long has the modifier based purge been going on for? And more importantly, why?"

"I don't know, Aneki. In the meantime, perhaps we should do something about forcing our way in. You have the skill, so if you would be so kind..."

"Thanks a bucket, Brainstorm," I said. "Do you have any idea how hard that stuff is to cut? It may only look like it is half an inch thick to you, but some sort of magic has been used to condense it. There are all sorts of materials all sharing the same space. I have to cut through steel, assorted carbon matrixes, titanium, tungsten, silicon compounds and Luna knows what else. There are alloys and compounds I don't even recognize. It's bloody hard work!"

Once again, I found myself using my magic to cut through the material of which the structural elements and shell of Habitat Eleven were made. I considered dialing up my disintegration beam spell and firing it at the door, but the memories of the explosion from the last time I did that were enough to keep me in check. Instead, the spell I formed was more like a scalpel, allowing me to carefully slice through the complex materials slowly enough that atoms boiling off didn't create too much heat when they oxidized or formed other compounds.

Finally, the last section of material succumbed to my spell, allowing me to pull a pony sized piece from the door, and squeeze through. Again the release was easy enough to find, so I hoofed it, and watched as the lights came on and the door opened.

"Aneki, you idiot!" I chastised myself. All I had needed to do was cut a small hole through the door, then reach in with telekinesis, and push the damn button! Admittedly, being able to see where the button was made it easier, but it was more-or-less in the same location it had been with the last tough door. Oh well, next time...

I glanced around the room; well, it wasn't really a room. It was an area big enough for one pony to stand, with wiggle room. To the left and right were pony-holes into the cylindrical portion of the gland. Directly in front of me was the control panel for all of the feeds going into Habitat Ten. It looked fairly dead.

First, I checked the master switch for electricity. The switch had three positions: ON, TRIPPED (FAULT) and OFF. It was in the OFF position. Power had been deliberately shut off. Despite the risk of powering up the systems after such a long period of being inactive, I forced the switch into the ON position. It remained there, a series of small green lamps along the top of the panel lighting, one after the other. Three or four of them flickered a few times before remaining lit, as local systems dealt with the fault conditions that arose.

Next, I turned my attention to the nutrient feed. Like the power, it had been turned off. Air purification was off. Communications was also off. The habitat had been deliberately shut off by whoever it was that had access to this room. I reactivated the nutrient feed and air purification switches, watching as another series of lamps lit.

Stormie squeezed in, part way, looking at the controls, over my shoulder. With her magic, she reached out and pushed a button I had so far ignored, and a virtual display appeared in the air before us. That was pretty neat! Using her magic, she was somehow able to change what was displayed on the screen. She cycled through several different views of what I presumed were locations within Habitat Ten. Some were deserted, while others displayed piles of bones, or lone skeletons.

The display changed again, bringing up charts and graphs. Stormie paged through several such screens until stopping at one displaying air purity.

"We won't be going in there for a while," she said, pointing to a graph that showed carbon dioxide levels. "It's toxic in there. Maybe our Hellite bodies could handle that, but I don't fancy trying it. Any ordinary pony would die. Habitat Ten wasn't a sealed system, unlike Habitat Eleven. It was parasitic, using the life support systems of Habitat Eleven. When they were disconnected, whatever lived in there was doomed. They probably lived until the air was unbreathable, fighting through the darkness, trying to escape. Eventually, the carbon dioxide level was so high it killed them, and the microorganisms that devoured their corpses pushed it even higher."

"What a horrific way to die," I said.

"You know what this means, don't you?" Stormie asked.

I nodded. "Habitat Ten was host to genocide, to a form of racial purification more extreme than has been forced on the ponies."

"It is both the scene of a massive, unforgivable crime, and the final resting place of an entire species. We cannot live here."

"It also means we must now cut our way into the control rooms of each and every other tank down here, to work out which really are tanks, if any, and which may or may not contain other living beings."

"That is not something I look forward to," Stormie sighed. "I always knew those in power were rotten, but this is too much."

"Stormie, this virtual display: it responds to magic? Is there any other way to use it?"

"No," Stormie shook her head. "It's designed to be operated by magic and magic alone."

"Then, that means the race of ponies that had access to this place were not pegasi. They had to be a race with horns, or some other way to use to magic."

"The winged unicorns!"